DUST: The Plates of the Present

DUST: The Plates of the Present is a collective photo archive set up by French painter Thomas Fougeirol and American artist Jo-ey Tang that ran between 2013 and 2018. The two invited 136 artists to an improvised darkroom in Ivry-sur-Seine near Paris, where they were asked to produce a series of eight photograms. The photogram is an imprint of light on photosensitive paper. The project—a homage to the early days of photography and the avant-garde experiments of the twentieth century—presented an alternative to the mainstream forms of the contemporary art world based on the shared use of resources, a playful questioning of the idea of authorship, and the premise of an alternative mode of collectivity. In 2019 Fougeirol and Tang donated the entire DUST archive to the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris.